4th Generation District Heating (4GDH) Integrating smart thermal grids into future sustainable energy systems

Smart Energy Systems for coherent 100% renewable energy and transport solutions

Recent developments in phase change materials for energy storage applications: A review

Smart energy and smart energy systems

This study presents one scenario for a 100% renewable energy system in Europe by the year 2050. The transition from a business-as-usual situation in 2050, to a 100% renewable energy Europe is analysed in a series of steps. Each step reflects one major technological change. For each step, the impact is presented in terms of energy (primary energy supply), environment (carbon dioxide emissions), and economy (total annual socio-economic cost). The steps are ordered in terms of their scientific and political certainty as follows: decommissioning nuclear power, implementing a large amount of heat savings, converting the private car fleet to electricity, providing heat in rural areas with heat pumps, providing heat in urban areas with district heating, converting fuel in heavy-duty vehicles to a renewable electrofuel, and replacing natural gas with methane. The results indicate that by using the Smart Energy System approach, a 100% renewable energy system in Europe is technically possible without consuming an unsustainable amount of bioenergy. This is due to the additional flexibility that is created by connecting the electricity, heating, cooling, and transport sectors together, which enables an intermittent renewable penetration of over 80% in the electricity sector. The cost of the Smart Energy Europe scenario is approximately 10–15% higher than a business-as-usual scenario, but since the final scenario is based on local investments instead of imported fuels, it will create approximately 10 million additional direct jobs within the EU.

Smart Energy Europe: The technical and economic impact of one potential 100% renewable energy scenario for the European Union

The condensed Transformation Roadmap can be expressed as: 1. Eliminate temperature errors in existing distribution networks and substations in order to make existing systems more efficient. This will reduce existing temperature levels. 2. Avoid these temperature errors in new network parts and in new substations. 3. Use heat exchangers with longer thermal lengths in substations for indirect connection of customer heating systems and closed hot water preparation. This will reduce the temperature differences between the warmer distribution waters and the colder fluids to be heated. 4. Reduce existing customer temperature demands by elimination of local temperature errors, reduction of heat demands by means of energy efficiency measures, and by installation of larger heating surfaces in radiator and ventilation systems. 5. New low temperature network parts in conjunction with existing systems can be connected by concurrent operation of these parts as secondary networks. 6. The long-term vision is to deliver heat to substations with a supply temperature of 50°C, while obtaining a return temperature of 20°C as annual average. However, the technical solutions for obtaining this low return temperature have yet not been defined.

https://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:96252/ATTACHMENT01

Transformation Roadmap from High to Low Temperature District Heating Systems

Euroheat & Power is now working towards a European Technology Platform for District Heating and Cooling. In response to this important European DHC research initiative, a preliminary detailed list of research issues within 18 dimensions was elaborated and communicated to more than 100 people in February 2008. After additions and comments received, an updated list of research issues was again distributed in July 2008. This paper contains the current list of suggested research issues.

Robin Wiltshire

Papers

Transformation Roadmap from High to Low Temperature District Heating Systems

European DHC Research Issues